


Scar Tissue

by Metallic_Sweet



Category: Tokyo Ghoul
Genre: (they create maps to remember), Canon-Typical Violence, Gift Fic, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Moral Ambiguity, Post-Canon, growing older
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-25
Updated: 2016-01-25
Packaged: 2018-05-16 05:42:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5816374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Metallic_Sweet/pseuds/Metallic_Sweet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They come together a decade later.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Scar Tissue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rurin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rurin/gifts).



They come together a decade later.

Kaneki is thirty-two, although he feels more the thirty-three of Sasaki. He finds himself looking much older in the mirror and press photographs. Tsukiyama is thirty-five, although he appears perpetually thirty. It annoys Kaneki.

“It used to be the other way around,” he says, unkindly, as they lie in the dark but absolutely not asleep.

“I take after my mother,” Tsukiyama murmurs.

It kills the annoyance. Kaneki looks up at the ceiling. He listens to Tsukiyama’s breathing grow deeper. To how it evens out.

Only then can Kaneki force himself to close his eyes.

 

It’s uneasy, this thing they have.

They don’t see each other often. Only twice a year to be exact. It’s the handful of weeks when Tsukiyama returns to Japan from France. He comes for two weeks in March on the anniversary of the CCG’s formal dissolution and stays for the annual dinner commemorating the founding of the Better Relations Committee that Kaneki heads. He comes back for another fortnight at the beginning of autumn. It’s ostensibly for business but mostly to remember his family. He does not invite Kaneki to France nor to where he goes to mourn his family. Even if he did, Kaneki would not be able to accept. He will likely never have a passport and cannot leave Japan. He killed Tsukiyama’s family.

They meet up during these times. Even if they didn’t want to, they can’t avoid each other. It’s only after all of the ceremonies and memorials and press conferences and parties that Kaneki increasingly loses his temper at that they have scant handfuls of hours alone. They never go to Kaneki’s apartment. It’s a sad affair, barely lived in and dirty laundry and ghoul ration containers everywhere. Even so, he’d offered the first time when they’d been both a little drunk and Tsukiyama in charge of the taxi. The refusal, a rare moment of point blank response from Tsukiyama, still sits like lead in Kaneki’s gut.

“I don’t trust you enough for that.”

Tsukiyama’s hotel rooms are warm and spacious but impersonal. He doesn’t seem to mind them, but it’s hard for Kaneki to tell what Tsukiyama likes and doesn’t like. He never sleeps well in these unfamiliar places, but Tsukiyama doesn’t either. Kaneki prefers to stay awake as much as he can, watching Tsukiyama sleep. Tsukiyama sleeps on the side of the bed closest to the door. Kaneki would rather have that position, but he knows Tsukiyama fears being thrown out the window. They don’t say _it’s not you_. It would be a lie.

It’s not their lack of trust. Not completely. They do, in many ways, trust each other. Kaneki knows that Tsukiyama will back him up in the political arena or in a fight. Tsukiyama has voiced, in a drunken message ages ago now, that Kaneki is the only person who understands him anymore. But that’s it. It’s them and their demons. Some of them are their own. Some of them they share. Kaneki doesn’t touch Tsukiyama’s chest where he once drove his kagune through sternum, ribs, and muscle. Tsukiyama avoids the lump of scar tissue under Kaneki’s hair where Arima’s thrust exited his skull. They do not blanket the other. They do not hold each other down. It means they constantly have to negotiate. Sometimes it’s easy. Sometimes it’s not.

It’s uneasy.

 

There’s many days, especially when they have been apart for months, that Kaneki spends wondering why he puts up with this. 

They aren’t in a committed relationship. Kaneki isn’t sure if he could handle it. One day, probably very soon, Tsukiyama will continue his family line. It’s not something they’ve discussed, but Tsukiyama dates when he is back in France. Occasionally the same person for weeks at a time. It fills the gossip mill. Kaneki knows he shouldn’t listen, but he does.

“No one will ever care about him like I do.”

Touka looks at him. She doesn’t say anything. Kaneki grips the coffee cup. Feels it creak. He sets it down. Touka takes it away. It’s the third cup he’s broken since the start of the year. It’s February.

“Your temper’s becoming a problem,” Hinami says, very quietly, after a long Diet session.

It’s true. She would know best because she’s his foremost advisor. It hurts, too. She hasn’t been the little girl that he tried to care for in over a decade, but he can’t forget. He can’t forget that he saved her only to leave her. He can’t forget that she saved him only for him to leave her again. Kaneki spends a lot of time angry, but it’s never with other people. It’s with himself.

It’s why he knows he wouldn’t be able to handle a committed relationship. Not just with Tsukiyama but with anyone. He’s grown older, but there will always be a part of him that’s still firmly rooted in the past. It aches and snarls and lashes out. It’s easy to take it out on others. It’s even easier to take it out on himself.

Most days, Kaneki doesn’t want to put up with it. On those days, he has to drag himself from bed, teeth clenched so hard as he drives to work that they sometimes crack. Everything is too bright, too loud, too many people, too many cars. His kakugan shows against all of his attempts at control, and both of his eyes ache so badly sometimes he has to step out of sessions to throw up. On the worst days, he can’t come back. Hinami drives him home when he’s that ill.

He would have given up long ago if Tsukiyama hadn’t moved away. Kaneki had yelled at him, and they had fought. Kagune at first and then fists and kicks and finally wrestling, the hotel suite destroyed in their wake. Tsukiyama broke Kaneki’s bad arm. Kaneki threw him against the far wall.

“This is why,” Tsukiyama whispered, crouched and fingertips pressed against the delicate flesh of Kaneki’s jugular; they were lying next to each other on the floor, bloody, gasping, spent. “I have to go.”

“I won’t let you,” Kaneki said, even as Tsukiyama’s nails dug into the flesh.

“I cannot cooperate.”

It was bitter and sad and a thousand things that Kaneki knows. There were tears. Tsukiyama’s. Kaneki’s. For the same things. For different things.

“This body is not my own.”

Kaneki is the only reason that Tsukiyama and his company occasionally assist the Better Relations Committee. They need the company’s international connections. They need Tsukiyama even more because he carries the respect of influential ghouls.

“I,” Tsukiyama whispered, leaning forward pressing his lips against the shell of Kaneki’s ear, “still don’t know the words I wanted to tell you before.”

“Tell me,” Kaneki choked before Tsukiyama swallowed him whole.

Some days, this is the only thing that keeps Kaneki alive.

 

They do not trust each other. Demons swim between them. What they have is not a relationship. It is uneasy. It is a decade late.

But, in the scant moments they steal in impersonal hotel rooms, they come together.

“Kaneki-kun.”

They taste like coffee or like blood. Never of flesh. Kaneki’s diet is nauseating on a good day. Tsukiyama’s is unsteady at best. They hold each other by their shoulders. Upper arms. Thighs. Calves. The soles of the feet. Tsukiyama traces his fingers over Kaneki’s kakuhou. Along hipbones. Over the thin scar that started it all. Kaneki presses his knuckles against Tsukiyama’s kakuhou. Drags nails over ribs. The knobs of spine. They are built out of sticks, thatched together with sinew and tendon.

“Does it hurt?” Tsukiyama murmurs.

“Everything hurts,” Kaneki snarls, breathes, chokes.

Tsukiyama slides against him on the bed. Presses his lips against Kaneki’s left temple. Opens his mouth. His teeth graze over the vein network that has become entwined in growing wrinkles. Kaneki tightens his hold on Tsukiyama’s bicep. Tsukiyama’s tongue flicks out. A snake tasting the air. Kaneki shivers.

“Turn the light off.”

“No,” Tsukiyama murmurs.

Kaneki pushes him. Tsukiyama pulls back. They stare at each other for a long moment. Tsukiyama’s hair has grown long again. It falls into his eyes. Strands rustle with his eyelashes when he blinks.

“No,” Tsukiyama repeats, harder, darker.

They stare at each other. Tsukiyama doesn’t like the dark. It’s a relatively new development. Kaneki sucks in a breath. Hisses it out through his teeth.

“Fine.”

Tsukiyama doesn’t relax. He licks his lips. Tilts his head to the left so that his hair slips off of his face. It stretches the skin of his neck. His right shoulder. His stares straight into Kaneki’s eyes.

“You have wrinkles.”

Kaneki grits his teeth. Tsukiyama lifts his left hand. Reaches out. Down. His brushes his fingertips over the crooked bones of Kaneki’s right arm. The arm his cousin chopped off. A shiver runs through Kaneki. Dries up the saliva in his mouth. Tsukiyama watches him.

“You should take care of yourself.”

Naked, sculpted, and smooth to the untrained eye. Kaneki’s eyes are bad, but he knows Tsukiyama better than he knows himself. He’s too lean again. His free arm is tucked between his legs. Shielding his torso.

“You’re a fucking hypocrite.”

A smile. Fingers curl loosely over the crooked bones. The kiss is dry and chaste. They rest cheek to cheek, noses brushing each other’s hair as they exhale.

This is the way they are. Kisses, pushes, touches. They devour each other, rememorizing the planes and valleys and crags in their flesh, making maps to retrace in the months they are away from each other. They try to get each other to gulp, gasp, writhe. They remind each other why they’re alive.

“You’re in here,” Kaneki hisses, hands pressed over Tsukiyama’s heart, which hammers in his breast.

“You grew back,” Tsukiyama whispers, fingers ghosting over Kaneki’s toes, which twitch and curl.

It’s taken a decade, but they’ve come together. They’ve worn each other down. Their demons chew on each other, so entwined after all this time that there’s nothing more to hide. The map might change, wrinkles and shifts in behavior, but they rememorize it all again, twice a year, huddled up in each other’s arms.

They never will trust each other, not enough to be more than what they are, but, in these moments, they are together.


End file.
